Monday, May 21, 2007

Broad conditionals


“A comparative model fitting exercise is presented that shows that a conditional probability model can explain as much of the data on abstract indicative conditional reasoning tasks as psychological theories that supplement material implication with various rationally unjustified processing assumptions. Consequently, when people are asked to solve laboratory reasoning tasks, they can be seen as simply generalising their everyday probabilistic reasoning strategies to this novel context.” Mike Oaksford, Nick Chater (2003) 
Conditional Probability and the Cognitive Science of Conditional Reasoning 
Mind & Language 18 (4), 359–379.